How do actors work in Akka?

What is an Actor in Akka? An actor is essentially nothing more than an object that receives messages and takes actions to handle them. It is decoupled from the source of the message and its only responsibility is to properly recognize the type of message it has received and take action accordingly.

What is actor model in Akka?

Akka Actors The Actor Model provides a higher level of abstraction for writing concurrent and distributed systems. It alleviates the developer from having to deal with explicit locking and thread management, making it easier to write correct concurrent and parallel systems.

Is Akka actor a thread?

The good news is that Akka actors conceptually each have their own light-weight thread, which is completely shielded from the rest of the system. This means that instead of having to synchronize access using locks you can write your actor code without worrying about concurrency at all.

What is Akka actor in Scala?

Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant event-driven applications on the JVM. Akka can be used with both Java and Scala. This guide introduces Akka Actors by describing the Scala version of the Hello World example.

Why Akka is not popular?

In general we recommend against using Akka Cluster and actor messaging between different services because that would result in a too tight code coupling between the services and difficulties deploying these independent of each other, which is one of the main reasons for using a microservices architecture.

What is actor based concurrency?

The fundamental idea of the actor model is to use actors as concurrent primitives that can act upon receiving messages in different ways: Send a finite number of messages to other actors. Spawn a finite number of new actors. Change its own internal behavior, taking effect when the next incoming message is handled.

How do you make an Akka actor?

Actors are created by passing a Props instance into the actorOf factory method which is available on ActorSystem and ActorContext.

  1. actor. ActorSystem.
  2. // ActorSystem is a heavy object: create only one per application.
  3. val system = ActorSystem(“mySystem”)
  4. val myActor = system. actorOf(Props[MyActor], “myactor2”)

Where are Akka actors used?

By using Akka actors we can easily write asynchronous code without the need for locks and synchronization. One of the advantages of using message instead of method calls is that the sender thread won’t block to wait for a return value when it sends a message to another actor.

Is Akka single threaded?

In Akka, actors are guaranteed to be run in a single-threaded illusion, which means that the Akka framework takes care of threading issues while allowing us to focus on the behavior that needs to be implemented. Actors may only communicate with each other and the outside world by through messages.

How do you stop Akka actor?

In Akka, you can stop Actors by invoking the stop() method of either ActorContext or ActorSystem class. ActorContext is used to stop child actor and ActorSystem is used to stop top level Actor.

Do people still use Akka?

Of our 50 case studies and community stories, 39 of them (78%) are using Akka in production–happy clients include Walmart, Hootsuite, Huffington Post, WhitePages, Gilt, and Ticketfly.